Sadly Roland Moreno, the French inventor of the Smart Card, has passed away, and at a much-too-early age.

Mr Moreno invented the Smart Card concept in 1974 – the year that I got my first job after university.  A whole working generation later, we are still using Smart Cards while discussions about how we will or won’t use mobile phones for banking and payments go on and on.  It seems that the Asian user community has a highly-functional and lateral-thinking approach with the shortest time-to-market: just duct-tape your Smart Card inside your mobile phone.

Mr Moreno deserves huge recognition from all male Brits for his invention, because:

a)      he was an inventor, and Brits love inventors, thinking that they should all have been born British really, and

b)      he used a great British invention - Meccano - to build and test the original card-handling mechanism that helped him to succeed in getting his patent.

Let’s see if any of today’s inventions for payment processing have the legs that Mr Moreno’s Smart Card has had.

Respect.